F

As you watch this loony psycho-thriller, you might be forgiven for thinking that the title refers to the trio of bad, worse, worst—the trajectory it follows in fashioning a truly idiotic tale of a seminary student targeted by one of those apparently omniscient (and incredibly well-funded) serial killers to die for some wrong he’d committed years before. “Thr3e” (to employ the cute variant the makers have adopted in obvious imitation of “Se7en,” its clear overall model) is astronomically awful, like the crappiest copy of a Dario Argento giallo ever made. Even among the abominable releases of January, a month that vies only with August in notoriety, this is one lulu of a movie.

Marc Blucas, probably still best remembered for his one-season stint as Riley on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” despite roles in scads of dreadful movies (like the horror shlocker “They”), stars as Kevin Parson, a glum graduate student in theology at a curiously ill-attended campus in some dank, dreary city who’s writing a doctoral thesis on—what else?—good and evil. A troubled, perpetually morose soul (who nonetheless is able to afford an apartment that looks the size of a waiting room in Grand Central Station), Kevin becomes the latest intended victim of a notorious fellow called the Riddle Killer, who’s just offed the brother of a police psychologist named Jennifer Peters (Justine Waddell) and now seems to have turned his attention to our hero, informing the poor guy in his first assault that he must “Confess” to some unspecified past crime to save himself.

As Kevin tries—with the help of that psychologist and his closest childhood friend Samantha (Laura Jordan)—to unravel the reason behind his being chosen by the anonymous killer, the secrets of his unhappy childhood come to light, though in a fashion that’s more obfuscating than revealing. They include his upbringing in a home so literally mad that on initial examination it appears to be an asylum. But no: it’s just the house of his nutty and brutally controlling aunt Belinda (Priscilla Barnes), also called Princess for the tiara she wears, and his nebbishy uncle Eugene (Tom Bower), who for some reason goes about in a fez, and Bobby (Jeff Hollis), a mentally-challenged fellow whom I assume to be his cousin. The revelations also include a long-repressed incident involving the young Kevin (Bruno Jasienski) attempting to do away with the neighborhood bully Slater (Jack Ryan), who (now plated by Bill Moseley) at once becomes the chief suspect in the attempts on Parson’s life, most of which involve explosions that are singularly inept in their planning and manage—unless my body count is off—to kill precisely nobody. (It does appear, however, that a dog is incinerated—though, happily, off-screen.)

It would be as fruitless as dull to detail the contortions of what passes for a plot; suffice it to say that it’s all so silly and incredible that one is amazed to learn not only that no fewer than nine producers signed on to accept culpability for transferring it to film, but also that it initially served as the basis for a novel (by one Ted Dekker, apparently a prolific author of what seems to be a genre of evangelical thrillers) and that the concluding explanation—which explains the graphically-challenged title—so obviously purloins from Robert Bloch’s best-known work that the late author’s estate should sue. Things aren’t helped by the sloppy direction from Robby Henson, Sebastian Milaszewski’s drab cinematography or David Bergeaud’s pallid score.

Obviously no actors could flourish in such an environment, but Blucas, dour and unsympathetic as he is, benefits from the fact that he’s surrounded by people who are even worse. Jordan and Waddell are both laughably stilted, but both are outclassed—in the worst possible sense—by Barnes, whose scenery-chewing is so grotesque one assumes for awhile that it must be intended as comic, though it eventually becomes clear that’s not the case.

This is the first release by an arm of Twentieth Century Fox called “Fox Faith,” apparently devoted to issuing movies for the “Left Behind” set—all in the service of Mammon, of course. On the basis of this initial effort, an act of penance would seem in order. But at least the title shows some honesty in advertising: “Thr3e” isn’t even half the movie “Se7en” was.